"Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after
century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race
on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance,
for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age
and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of
fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing
than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold;
for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church;
for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of
the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a
schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover
America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in
thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman
much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk
was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement
of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and
prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the
beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came
faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the
fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn
timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation
of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done
this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and
month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly,
across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make
the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.
"To those who know a little of Christian history probably the
most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great
events and the well–remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of
entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own
individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves—and sins and
temptations and prayers—once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now.
They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed
to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each of them once believed and prayed as I
believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and
fell again. Each of them worshipped at the eucharist, and found their thoughts
wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew—just as
really and pathetically as I do these things. There is a little ill–spelled
ill–carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor:—'Here sleeps
the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much'. Not another
word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of
Christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen
centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbours who saw all
one's life were sure one must have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday eucharist
in her village church every week for a life–time mean to the blessed Chione—and
to the millions like her then, and every year since? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this
ever repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through
the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought. (All that going with one to
the altar every morning!)
"It is because it became embedded deep down in the life of
the christian peoples, colouring all the via
vitae of the ordinary man and woman, marking its personal turning-points,
marriage, sickness, death and the rest, running through it year by year with
the feasts and fasts and the rhythm of the Sundays, that the eucharistic action
became inextricably woven into the public history of the Western world. The
thought of it is inseparable from its great turning-points also. Pope Leo doing
this in the morning before he went out to daunt Attila, on the day that saw the
continuity of Europe saved; and another Leo doing this three and a half
centuries later when he crowned Charlemagne Roman Emperor, on the day that saw
that continuity fulfilled. Or again, Alfred wandering defeated by the Danes
staying his soul on this, while mediaeval England struggled to be born; and
Charles I also, on that morning of his execution when mediaeval England came to
its final end. Such things strike the mind with their suggestions of a certain
timelessness about the eucharistic action and an independence of its setting,
in keeping with the stability in an ever–changing world of the forms of the
liturgy themselves. At Constantinople they 'do this' yet with the identical
words and gestures that they used while the silver trumpets of the Basileus
still called across the Bosphorus, in what seems to us now the strange
fairy-tale land of the Byzantine empire. In this twentieth century Charles de
Foucauld in his hermitage in the Sahara 'did this' with the same rite as
Cuthbert twelve centuries before in his hermitage on Lindisfarne in the
Northern seas. This very morning I did this with a set of texts which has not
changed by more than a few syllables since Augustine used those very words at
Canterbury on the third Sunday of Easter in the summer after he landed. Yet 'this' can still take hold of a man’s life and work with it.
"It is not strange that the eucharist should have this power
of laying hold of human life, of grasping it not only in the abstract but in
the particular concrete realities of it, of reaching to anything in it, great
impersonal things that rock whole nations and little tender human things of one
man’s or one woman’s living and dying—laying hold of them and translating them
into something beyond time. This was its
new meaning from the beginning. The
Epistle to the Hebrews pictures our Lord as saing from the moment of his birth
at Bethlehem, 'Other sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a Body hast
Thou prepared for me; Lo I come to do Thy will, O God'. On the last night of His life it was still
the same: 'This is My Body'—'And now I
come to Thee'. It was the whole perfect
human life that had gone before and all His living of it that was taken and
spoken and deliberately broken and given in the institution of the eucharist."
Gregory Dix, The shape of the liturgy (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1945), 743-746.
this way of doing the eucharist alone fulfils every need of every church in every age. . . .
The outlines of that ritual pattern come down to us unchanged in christian practice from before the crucifixion. . . . The needs of a christian public worship have added to these inheritances from our Lord's own jewish piety only an 'introduction' of praise and a brief prayer of thanksgiving [(743)].
Having lost their nerve and "settled for the least epistemic status possible" ("the possibility of mere true belief"), "Christian intellectuals have taken to lauding the epistemic privileges of the margins" in an attempt "to snatch back lost ground."
"Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after
century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race
on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance,
for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age
and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of
fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing
than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold;
for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church;
for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of
the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a
schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover
America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in
thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman
much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk
was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement
of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and
prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the
beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came
faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the
fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn
timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation
of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done
this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and
month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly,
across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make
the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.
"The error of antiquity was to believe that the functioning of thought and the conceptual lexicon proper to the philosophy of nature extended to the sciences of nature. The error of certain modern scientists [(savants)], insofar as they are in search of a philosophy, is to believe that the kind of thinking and conceptual vocabulary proper to the sciences of nature can serve to build a philosophy of nature."
"We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love's losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last."
